Precise Diagnosis, Functional Mechanisms, and Therapeutic Potentials in Gastrointestinal Cancers, volume II

Book excerpt: Significant changes in diet, environment, and population increase gastrointestinal cancer morbidity. A growing number of studies on precise diagnosis and underlying mechanisms are being elucidated, some of which may even conflict with assumptions of past decades. Therefore, collecting recent findings on novel diagnoses and/or risk factors in gastrointestinal cancers is a prerequisite for a better understanding of the disease. Despite remarkable progressions in surgical treatments and chemotherapies, the prognosis of gastrointestinal cancer is far from satisfactory due to the high occurrence of drug resistance. Based on the identification of novel biomarkers as well as their underlying mechanisms, targeted drug development will provide significant complementary therapeutic effects to conventional chemoradiotherapies. High-throughput methods such as next-generation sequencing on RNA level and mass spectrometry on protein/lipid/metabolite level serve as efficient strategies for biomarker identification and drug development.